Government and Citizenship

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17472.htm

Government and Citizenship

By Charles Sullivan

04/03/07 "ICH" -- -- I have been thinking a great deal of late about government and its relationship to the citizenry. It should be obvious that any government that claims to be of the people and for the people must also serve the people. Yet it is clear that the current government does not serve the people—it exploits them. When sixty-four percent of the citizenry demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the government responds not by withdrawing its troops, but by escalating the war, that government cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. What is it then?

It is a government of the wealthy; a corporate, fascist government of the highest order. It is a government that spurns ordinary people and uses its power against them. It is the opposite of the kind of representative government it purports to be. It extorts tax dollars from its citizens and sends them to do the bidding of the very wealthy under the pretense of patriotism and national defense. It is, in fact, using citizens against citizens and plundering the national treasure with the tools of empire, class warfare, and imperialism.

Every military weapon that is manufactured and put in use diminishes us as a nation. Militarism enriches the defense contractors and the plutocracy by robbing the citizens. It deprives us of an urgently needed national health care system, better schools, decent jobs that provide living wages; and it exacts social and environmental costs that are incalculable, all of which are important to ordinary Americans.

We do not have a government based upon the rule of law or equality, as evidenced by its own history—even its recent history, as we saw in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina; or in the dilapidated military hospitals across the land where limbless soldiers cannot get the health care they so desperately need, and lie waiting and wasting in filth and ruin. These are the troops the government purports to care so much about. Broken men and women from combat zones are the worn out tools of empire builders. Like unwanted toys, they are used up and no longer played with by our rulers; an embarrassment, something to be warehoused safely from public view.

The president and his minions behave as if they are above the law. Laws apply to his subjects, but not to the King who thinks he is the supreme ruler.

They want us to believe that we support our troops by placing magnetic ribbons on our vehicles and by prominently displaying American flags. But Walter Reed and other military hospitals across the land reveal what we really think about our military veterans in ways that cannot be offset by patriotic trinkets and jingoism. The government honors them in patriotic language even as they abandon them in deed.

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